Can I Be On Planet?

Planet Debian is for any active and directly involved participant in the Debian development community. Inclusion in Planet should reflect a relationship that already exists -- it is not meant to create one. Inclusion is not restricted to people who are currently Debian developers nor are ex-developers necessarily barred from inclusion.

Defining activity and direct involvement is tough and there are many ways of participating in Debian (e.g., packaging, translations, administration, etc). I am happy to consider all of these types of involvement for the purposes of inclusion in Planet. In terms of deciding what is enough activity, I am daunted by the fact that there has been academic research on the difficulties of deciding what an active member in Debian is. As a result I will continue to rely primarily on what blog owners themselves feel unless the evidence available to me points to the contrary.

Planet participants should include feeds that provide stable permanent URLs so that they do not flood planet repeatedly and should include content in English only. An inability to do either of these will be grounds for exclusion from Planet until this can be fixed.

What Can I Post On Planet

Planet Debian aims to aggregate the blog posts of people who are active on Debian and not only to aggregate the blog posts about Debian. The point is provide a window into the community itself. Posts that are about Debian are a great idea and some people will choose to only syndicate "on topic" posts. But other posts are also welcome!

There are two rules about content on Planet Debian:

Provide an English language only feed.

Try not to annoy people. While there is absolutely no requirement that posts need to be about Debian, if there are a subset of posts that you are annoying a large number of people and generating many complaints, you may be ask you you to consider providing a feed without the posts in question. If you stay away from advertising content (or content that might be confused as such) and from excessively personal information, you should be fine.

How do I add myself to Planet?

Any developer may add, amend or remove their own blog entry from Planet Debian. To do so, they must have an account at alioth.debian.org. Any Debian developer can use their Alioth account to modify planet entries. Other Debian contributors can be added to the Alioth group and then also make changes to the configuration.

If you already have an Alioth account and are already a member of the project or are a Debian developer, simply do the following:

svn checkout svn+ssh://svn.debian.org/svn/planet-debian/trunk/config
cd config
vi config.ini
Entries should be in alphabetical order at the bottom of
the file and look like this:
[http://url.to/your/feed]
name = Your Name
svn commit -m "add/edit/remove Your Name"

If you're advocating, sponsoring, helping or managing someone in the NM queue, or a regular non-Developer contributor, you may add them as well.

Hackergotchi

Hackergotchi are the little face pictures that can appear next to your entry. They should be a transparent PNG of just your head, with a little shadow if you like. Aim for around 65x85, but it's not a strict size.

More Information

{{{Any Debian developer or any other active contributor to the project is welcome to be added to planet.

If you're a developer, you can simply add your own blog to the config file which is kept in a world-writable Subversion repository on gluck. The easiest thing to do is to SSH to gluck.debian.org and then read the instructions here:

/org/planet.debian.org/README

If you're not a developer, you'll need to have me add you.

In terms of content, there are two rules. The first rule is to provide an English language only feed. The second rule is the rather vague guideline of "don't annoy people." There is absolutely no requirement that posts need to be about Debian -- mine rarely are. However, if there are a subset of posts that you are annoying a large number of people, I will ask you you to consider providing a feed without the posts in question. This has only happened a few times in the past. If you stay away from advertising content (or content that might be confused as such) and from excessively personal information, you should be fine.

I'll be happy to welcome you to planet! Please let me know if you have any questions.}}}

Planet via Mailing list

People willing to receive DebianPlanet by mail can subscribe the mailing list.